North Carolina natives Nina Simone and Roberta Flack both began playing the piano and classical music as children. They trained to become classical pianists, and eventually became sultry, magnetic performers that have influenced generations of musicians over decades.
Nina Simone
The High Priestess of Soul, Nina Simone, said an artist’s duty is to reflect the times.
She wrote “Mississippi Goddam” in 1963 after civil rights activist Medgar Evers was assassinated, and four Black girls were killed when white supremacists bombed 16th Street Baptist Church in Alabama.
Her performance of “Why? (The King of Love is Dead),” at New York’s Westbury Music Fair, three days after Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in 1968, evokes images of the desperate and grim days after his death. “What will happen, now that the King of love is dead?” Simone sang. Two months later, U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated; his brother President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated in 1963.
Born was named Eunice Waymon at birth in Tryon, North Carolina in 1933. She started playing the piano when she was 3, and at 5, she began taking classical piano lessons with a piano teacher in the area.
She attended summer school at Julliard School of Music and auditioned for the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, but she was not accepted. Simone often talked about how racism prevented her from being accepted to the prodigious school and remained bitter about the experience all her life.
To make ends meet, she took a summer job at an Atlantic City bar playing the piano, while continuing to study classical music. The owner was impressed, but said he needed a singer. But Simone didn’t sing. Her brother told her to just sing the songs she knew. She changed her name to Nina Simone to conceal the job from her mother.
Simone built a following at the bar in Atlantic City. A music agent discovered her and booked her into bigger clubs on the East Coast. She recorded an album in 1957 that included songs she had been singing in her act, including “Little Girl Blue” and “I Loves You Porgy.”
I Loves you Porgy climbed the charts to Number 18 on Billboard’s Top 100 and stayed there for 15 weeks. From the late 1950s through the late 1960s Simone recorded several albums and toured the world, in addition to playing Carnegie Hall several times.
The death of Simone’s friends, King, Lorraine Hansberry, James Baldwin and others took toll on her. “Those events sent Nina into a long depression,” the narrator says in the 2015 documentary, “The Amazing Nina Simone.”
Simone, who family, friends and fellow musicians said had occasionally exhibited erratic behavior and spontaneous outbursts of anger, was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. In the 1970s, she was prescribed the medication she needed and moved to Liberia. She was absent from the music scene for several years and returned in 1976, to record music and perform around the world.
After her mom died, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Her last performance was in April 2002 at Carnegie Hall with other performers including Patti LaBelle. Simone died in April 2003. She was 70 years old. Her daughter, Lisa Simone, is a singer who continues to perform.
Simone’s songs have been used in many films and television shows. The 1993 film “Point of No Return” uses several of Simone’s songs because the main character, played by Bridget Fonda, is soothed and inspired by her music. In fact, Fonda’s character, who plays an assassin, is given the codename Nina because of her love for Nina Simone.
She sings her song “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” that’s included on her 1977 album “Black Gold,” to children on an episode of Sesame Street. The song is like a rallying cry to young Black children to recognize and be proud of their talents, their history and their worth.
Roberta Flack
Like Nina Simone, Roberta Flack had a musical gift that was evident when she started playing the piano as a young child. She began studying classical piano when she was 9.
When she was 15, Flack received a full music scholarship to attend Howard University. Born in Black Mountain, North Carolina in 1937, and raised in Arlington, Virginia, Flack wasn’t too far from home when she went to D.C. for college, but at 15 she said in the 2023 PBS documentary “American Masters: Roberta Flack,” she felt like she was all alone.
“I had never been away from my home, my family. … I had to learn a lot about life away from my family circle in a very short space of time,” she said.
A music professor convinced her to take some education courses after telling her that finding work as a classical pianist would be difficult. She took his advice and after graduating, took a job teaching in Farmville, North Carolina and at various public schools in D.C.
“It was a wonderful idea, because it was because of my teaching experience that I had a chance to really perform for the first time in front of the students I was teaching,” Flack said in the documentary. But she wanted to play at venues in front of an audience, she said.
She found an Italian restaurant in Georgetown that needed a piano player. She took the job and started by singing and playing classical songs, then she started playing Christmas songs. “People came because they wanted to hear me sing!” Flack said. “That’s the first chance I had to feel what it was to be under that light.”
She signed a record deal with Atlantic Records and recorded her first album in New York in 1969. The album was called “First Take” because she completed all 40 songs in just one take.
She came into the studio in command of the deep repertoire she had been regularly performing.
When Flack met people like civil rights activists, Jesse Jackson and Josea Williams, she wanted to contribute to their work. “Their energy inspired me,” she said. She sang protest songs like “Tryin’ Times,” about the riots and unrest happening, and songs that called for Black love and empowerment like “Be Real Black for Me,” which she recorded with her friend Donny Hathaway, a masterful singer she collaborated with often.
Flack and Hathaway produced a string of songs that are timeless love anthems: “Where Is the Love,” “You Are My Heaven,” “The Closer I Get to You,” and so many more. When Hathaway, who had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, committed suicide in 1979, Flack was devastated. She went on to record other popular duets with Peabo Bryson and Michael Henderson.
She was a pioneer in the music recording industry, producing her album “Feel Like Makin’ Love” in 1975 which made her one of the first Black women to produce her own music. Clint Eastwood asked her if he could use her Grammy Award-winning song, “Killing Me Softly,” in his 1971 film “Play Misty for Me. “He said the song totally hypnotized him, and he found himself driving off the side of the freeway when he heard it on the radio,” Flack said in the PBS documentary.
Younger generations are still influenced by Flack’s musical legacy. D’Angelo’s remake of “Feel Like Makin’ Love,” on his “Voodoo” album was popular, and Lauryn Hill’s remake of “Killing Me Softly” on The Fugees album “The Score” is iconic.
In 2022, Flack was diagnosed with degenerative disease ALS. In 2020, the Recording Academy honored her with the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.